7 Social Media Activities To Outsource

1. Blogging

Blogging comes in many forms from corporate blogs with a controlled message to personal blogs with information about that latest weekend retreat with friends. Businesses often find it difficult to provide the necessary resources to blog consistently with a message that is satisfactory to upper management and provide enough value to both marketing and SEO departments. This is where outsourcing can play a role in your blogging strategy.

Using contractors familiar with your industry is a great way to build unique content, open a dialog with your audience, build a community and generally step into the new form of customer communication.

Areas where outsourcing can assist in blogging include:

Blogging ideas

Market research

Content research

Ghost writing

Editing

Blog commenting

2. Twitter Management

Managing your Twitter feed can be a time-consuming project that may seem wasteful to some. Others see the value and rely on its ability to communicate quick bursts of information that don’t require a full blog post. Some ask whether people on Twitter have any attention span or whether the benefits are enough to pursue. With more than one million people joining weekly and billions of tweets happening monthly, it cannot be ignored by any marketer.

Relying on a contractor to provide every tweet to your audience may not be viable but there are other activities that can provide a wealth of benefit to your social media endeavor including:

3. Facebook Management

Facebook includes more than making friends and tagging friends in pictures. Building out product pages or creating groups around products are two great ways to increase exposure to your audience through fans and friends. Creating Facebook pages and managing communication within your community requires a certain amount of time of expertise to spread the company message without alienating your fans who are visiting Facebook to catch up with friends or arrange the next night out.

Great ways to include contractors within your Facebook strategy are:

Friend/Fan management

Community creation and participation

Group creation and management

Photo uploads

Video promotion

Event promotion

Product launches

4. Bookmarking

Although many social bookmarking services provide little link building value in SEO, there are perfectly valid human traffic reasons for utilizing bookmarking services online. People still visit and use bookmarking sites such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Etc. and the residual effect can be massive if you front page at Digg, Reddit, SERPd, etc.

Creating a personal bookmark, however, is not going to generate any sizable traffic to your site from a single user. But getting the attention of those that use these sites and offering them an easy alternative to bookmark your page and share it with their friends can have exponential effect on click-thrus. To gain the attention of the masses, and potentially land on the front page of a high traffic media site, requires a little seeding and promotion and this can be outsourced to contractors.

Sometimes this requires creative thinking to provide something of considerable value so your audience will be interested enough to take the desired action of bookmarking your site. This is often referred to as linkbait or viral marketing and will provide huge value to your SEO efforts as well as traffic, audience participation, community growth and so on.

5. Video marketing

When video marketing is discussed by businesses, it often spurs a conversation about the difficulties, costs and quality associated with producing videos for promotional purposes. Truth is that any point-and-shoot camera and a few minutes of idea generation will launch you into video marketing campaign that can captures million of visitors to your site. Think about the Will It Blend video series that was discovered and shot in an afternoon with less than $100 in expenses.

Contractors can be extremely helpful in the following ways:

Idea creation

Market research

Determining viability

Video creation

Submissions (YouTube, Vimeo, Ustream, etc.)

Social promotion

6. Document Marketing

Every business has more marketing material than they can possible publish and provide customers and prospects at any given time. Sometimes, this information can be easily re-purposed for blog posts, videos, etc. But taken as is, quickly edited to include links to pages on your site, it can be uploaded to several sites such as DocStoc, Scribd, YellowDocuments, etc. where links will flow and the search engines can see the visibility of your brand on social sites that link to you.

Moreover, promoting these documents through other social media avenues can add considerable site mentions to your overall online marketing campaign. It gives you the opportunity to completely dominate your space and brand your name and images to your audience no matter how they find you.

Outsourcing this is so simple and anybody can be trained in a matter of minutes to perform:

Document creation

Editing for links based on mapped URLs

Submissions (DocStoc, , Scribd, YellowDocuments, etc.)

7. Online PR

Online press releases are one of the greatest forms of social and PR marketing that can assist in brand development, SEO, audience awareness, community positioning and so on. Done right, online PR brings huge dividends by getting picked up by national and international newspapers and news stations. This will not only increase the credibility of your company but it will help you dominate the search engines for primary keywords.

The benefits of online PR extend beyond traditional press because the ability to produce and distribute each release is both easy and affordable and hundreds of news stories are generated out of each release.

The sensitive nature of press releases requires more scrutiny but contractors can help with:

There are other areas of social media and certainly more ways that outsourcing to contractors can benefit your business so please share whatever I missed here today in the comments below. And, if you feel so inclined, give this story a tweet, bookmark, Stumble or whatever promotion tickles your fancy.

About Ash Buckles

For 15 years, Ash Buckles has worked at the forefront of branding through search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, blog marketing, social media, and ColdFusion development. As a recognized industry thought leader, he regularly speaks at search marketing events put on by organizations such as the American Marketing Association, SLCSEM, and Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum. Ash also holds a weekly #seochat on Twitter to interview experts in the online marketing space. His experience includes online marketing consulting with hundreds of enterprise clients as well as small businesses.

Under the direction of Ash, SEO.com has been ranked #1 search marketing agency in three consecutive reports by Website Magazine, most recently in February 2012. The Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum also selected SEO.com as one of the Top 25 Fastest Growing companies in Utah. Ash graduated from BYU-Idaho in Information Systems and Business Management.

23 Comments

It is a bit difficult for small business owners find all these contractors and expect to get good results without having any guidance/prior experience. Any companies/freelancers you could recommend that does any of these? Also any websites that would ease the difficulty of finding right people on these topics?

Yeah, you can check out elance, freelancer, odesk, craigslist, etc. for places to find contractors. A great way to test contractors is to hire them for a specific task and see how it goes. When you find somebody who rocks, you keep them and add to their task list.

hey, thanks for sharing such important things.
regading outsource “WHO KNOWS YOUR BUSINESS BETTER THAN YOU”
i believe in this, if you found the perfect person of your field and who do this all things like you do, then and then your social media campaign performs well. I dont say that the other person can’t do that, but things that owner knows very well, not neccessary that your outsource partner or employee follows that as well.

You make a good point. I think it’s valid to outsource most of these tasks as they are fairly repetitive and require low skill levels.

When you are in a business as competitive as the SEO world, you really need to focus on tasks that are going to 1. provide the most impactful results for your clients and 2. retain and acquire new clients.

It’s really hard to manage all of this on your own, so outsourcing is a great option. But like noted above, it is hard to find a good freelancer at first, my suggestion, sometimes it’s best to hire a more expensive freelancer as it may turn out to cost less then hiring a low cost freelancer that doesn’t know what he is doing and takes twice as more time to complete the task!

Thanks for the thorough list you wrote here. I think that when it comes to outsourcing your internet marketing campaign, you only need three: content creators, social networking assistants, and optimizers. But hey, I’m open to more, especially when my needs grow in the near future.

Thank you for your very enlightening post. I am starting a small business. I always wanted to, my father owned a small candy store in queens. I am new to SEO and I was trying to go it alone. Because my business is new for the moment I cannot outsource this very important branch of marketing, so my question for you is what is the highest priority path to take. What will get me the most bang for my buck. I started with blogging and I am finding it is taking a while to build an audience. Excuse the newbie question and thank you for your time.

Thanks for the list, one thing that I would also include depending on what industry you are in are podcasts and slideshow presentations.
So much to think about but if you get a spread sheet and put all your tasks down and give yourself a time limit, everyday you will be surprised at how much you can get done in a short pace of time.
Use free updating services like ping.fm to post to facebook twitter etc.
Good luck with your social media campaigns.

Excellent additions. I think slideshow presentations could fall under document marketing and could be performed by the same contractor. Audio/video research, creation and promotion could definitely be outsourced as well.

Ash, thanks for a succinct article on outsourcing social media activities. You gave me a few ideas that are obvious, but nonetheless ideas I had not thought about.

For example, you list “Idea Creation” under outsourcing Video Marketing. Of course! Too often I’ve gotten a fixed idea of what I need, and then I find outsourcers to implement these ideas. But hey, why not outsource “Idea Creation” also? I’ll probably end up with new approaches I hadn’t thought of.

This is a very good article filled with good ideas. Like many before me expressed, it is not easy to find good people to contract with. The idea of subcontracting certain functions of your business to someone else to free up your time to run the business sounds like an obvious good move. In reality, I have found I end up spending more time finding someone, consulting with them and sometimes end up helping them do the subcontracted function. About a week into a project, I think I could have probably done this myself with less expenditure of effort. I am not proposing doing everything yourself. I just wish I could find qualified help. I can’t afford the full service firms that want $10K to handle the complete project.

This is a good article and I agree with the information. It is possible to find good companies that offer all of the services at an affordable price. But I would recommend asking them for referrals and make sure they have performed Facebook, Twitter and other updates for social media sites.

It may be difficult for small to medium size companies to outsource different segments of work to multiple subcontractors. It may be better to use a good web development company that has experince working on multiple tasks.